I’m not going to make this long because othr than the hyperbolic excellence I’ve been witnessing lately Barack really doesn’t incite my interest. A question though for all of you that say there isn’t a race issue

I’m not going to go into all the he said she said. There are literally thousands of articles available by typing Jena6 into your browser window. That name itself is part of the problem, and it says more about being human than it does about being black. Which is allegedly what this is about. Being black. which isn’t a crime. Fortunately, knocking someone down and kicking them like a football while they are unconscious is.

What you are likely to find should you type Jena6 in your browser window are a veritable avalanche of articles written by those who feel a grave injustice is being done to the young black men. Not young men. Young black men. I have a difference of opinion with all of these people. I think they should be punished, and severely, for the cowardly attack they perpetrated.Not because they are black. Because they are criminals.

I also feel that the antagonists in the white assaults on blacks should be punished severely. Assaulting someone is in the worst categories of crimes. Violence against a person. The parents deifying their children, when apparently several of them have violent criminal histories doesn’t change the one over riding premise. They kicked an unconscious human being for the sheer hell of it.

Is there a reason all this is happening? sure. People are stupid. That’s the nuts and bolts of the whole case. People are stupid. Younf Mr. Bell doesn’t think of himself as an individual, and apparently neither does anyone else in this backwater stretch of Louisiana. The desire to belong to something bigger than oneself is not new, but when you can only identify yourself because of your race you have lost track of what it means to be human.

It doesn’t matter if the whites in this purgatory on earth defined these young men as black. It doesn’t matter that the rabble rousers now clamoring around the case define these young men as black. What matters is how they define themselves, and reality dictates that they will go to prison alone. They will need to make the decision at some point in their lives that they are men. Not black men. Just men.

Had Mr. Bell and so many others thought of themselves as individuals this entire thing would’ve been avoided. I picture myself in their shoes. Looking up at those nooses hanging from the trees. They took it as an affront to their collective dignity. One of the ropes would;ve needed my name on it for me to even begin to think it was aimed at me. Mr. Bell knew it was aimed at his group, and he began a crusade in defense of that group. The group won’t be going to prison. The reason for that is many in the group found a better outlet for their anger over the incident, or just understood that this act of ignorance was aimed at the collective, and not the individual.

It’s unfortunate that the upbringing of these young men made their race more important to them than their own well being. You can rail away all you want, but the facts in the case are sound. No black men are going to prison. Only men are.